Friday, June 11, 2010

Can You Remember What Your First Vintage Card Was?

I can still recall the very first vintage card I ever owned. I must've been around 8 years old when I accompanied my Dad one Saturday to an antique shop in Putnam, Connecticut. These were generally boring trips for me, as I had little to no interest in looking at what I felt as a kid to be other people's junk. This one particular trip was different though, as we stumbled upon a small cardboard box containing an assortment of 1950's Bowman cards. There weren't any stars, just a bunch of commons, but they were in relatively decent shape. I think the cards were just a couple of bucks a piece, and my Dad told me I could pick any 3 that I wanted. Being obsessed at the time with the Boston Red Sox, I instantly grabbed a 1950 Bowman Maurice McDermott. I also picked out two 1952 Bowman cards as well, which I will save for another post...

Once I got a bit older and moved on to other interests, I carefully packed up my childhood card collection and moved onto other things like music and girls, as I'm sure a lot of boys my age did at the time. Unfortunately I haven't recovered the '50 Bowman McDermott to this day, so I picked up this graded copy on the cheap on eBay recently to fill in. Hopefully someday I will find my old beat up copy to put back in my collection where it belongs. The thing I remember most about picking this card up is the back:

I distinctly recall my father chuckling over the fact that they referred to McDermott as "String-bean Maury". This will always be one of my favorite vintage cards just because of the memories it evokes. Not to mention, to an 8 year old this 1950 card featuring a player from my beloved hometown team might as well have been a T206 Honus Wagner!

How about you, do you recall what the first vintage card you ever got was?

5 comments:

1954 Topps Dick Groat. I think I was 8 or 9 years old and I found it in my neighbor's garage and he let me keep it. It was pretty beat up but I loved it. Those things were oversized and I had nothing to put it in that would fit so I remember taking the dreaded scissors to it and trimming it down so it would fit in an album page.

Someone gave me about a dozen or so baseball cards from the 1950s and 1960s, but the only two I remember were Metts manager Casey Stengel and Milt Pappas, but pictured with some other team and not the Cubs. The Pappas was even autographed. I sold them in the early 1990s when I was a vendor at card shows.

As for hockey...I bought some 1971-72 Topps Hockey in 1990. Think I paid $20 for 30 cards. One or two good ones, mostly commons. Is that "vintage" enough, or do you mean like from the 1950s?

I bought a huge shoebox full of late 70's cards at a garage sale when I was 12 (1987) and there were a few older Topps cards from the 1960's and one battered 1952 Topps card, Frank Hiller #156. I still have that card, and I like to think that sometime in the 1970's, it was someone else's first vintage card as well. At the age of 12, having a card as old as my mother made it seem ancient.